Once, the late Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, Jr., Speaker of the House of Representatives, told someone that, "All politics is local." This now has been repeated so often that it ought to be stitched on a sampler and hung on the wall of the common room at the Home for Aging Hacks. What's always been interesting to me is what the Tipster left unsaid. If all politics is local, then all government is local, too, and an attack on one level of government generally turns into an attack on them all. Right now, all government at every level is under attack by the forces of organized wealth. The faces of the assailants change according to circumstances. In some places, they are bankers and financiers. In some other places, they are the extraction extremists of the energy industries. In some other places, they wear uniforms.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Now, in countries that already are dictatorships, this doesn't mean much, and in countries that are basically oligarchical kleptocracies, it means even less. But in democratic countries, allowing the forces of wealth to organize themselves within the institutions of self-government is to invite a deadly form of parasite into the body politic. We are seeing this graphically in Greece right now, which is having its rights and national sovereignty stripped away not by an invading army or an encroaching empire, but by a bunch of bankers who have organized themselves into a supra-government over the rest of Europe. And there are other countries in Europe already nervous that the birthplace of democracy will not be the last place to surrender its identity to foreign balance sheets.

"I fear that the German government, including its social
democratic faction, have gambled away in one night all the political capital
that a better Germany had accumulated in half a century," he
told the Guardian. Previous German governments, he said, had displayed "greater
political sensitivity and a post-national mentality." Habermas, widely
considered one of the most influential contemporary European intellectuals,
said that by threatening Greece with an exit from the eurozone over the
course of the negotiations, Germany had "unashamedly revealed itself as
Europe's chief disciplinarian and for the first time openly made a claim for
German hegemony in Europe."

Most Popular

And, considering the hole that Germany dug for itself in the previous half-century, that's a lot of political capital to squander.

The fact is that everybody likes to talk about the importance of local government until local government actually tries to govern. That's what happened with the Greeks on a national scale. In this country, you will hear politicians rail about "devolving" government to the states, which is fine with them, until the states decide that they will protect their citizens against environmental poisons. You will hear state politicians railing about the benefits of city and county governments, until their campaign contributors want to build a road or log the forest. We are at a dangerous tipping point between the power of organized wealth and the strength of our political institutions. Alas, in fact, we may be past it.

A brief list of examples:

In 2013, the elected government of the province of Quebec banned fracking under the riverbed of the St. Lawrence. A corporation from Alberta sued the province under the provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The company was able to do this because it had incorporated itself in Delaware. National borders do not matter. Neither, in this case, does the elected government of the province.

In November of 2014, a referendum in the city of Denton, Texas banned fracking within the city limits. In response, the Texas state legislature passed, and Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 40 which flatly forbade local governments from banning fracking and other extraction activities. Said Abbott:

Asked Monday whether the state was being hypocritical in limiting city
power in an era where state officials routinely blast – and sue – the federal government over its
uniform standards for various industries, Abbot said no. "We have sued the
federal government multiple times because of the heavy hand of regulation from
the federal government – trying to run individuals' lives, encroaching upon
individual liberty," he said. "At the same time, we are ensuring that people
and officials at the local level are not going to be encroaching upon
individual liberty or individual rights."

Corporations are people, too, my friend.

Ever since he was first elected to the governorship, Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, has made a habit out of knuckling local governments that inconvenience him and his paymasters, and on issues ranging from voting rights to the environment to open housing to paid sick leave. This makes the following passage on Walker's presidential campaign announcement a considerable crock of beans, even by Walker's standards, which are considerable: "Government that is closest to the people is usually the best. This is why we should move power and money out of Washington and send it back to our states and communities in key areas like Medicaid, transportation, workforce development and education." Unless, of course, there's a mine we want to dig, or the possibility that your town will vote the wrong way.

The very idea of government -- self-government and otherwise -- is under a kind of unprecedented assault. For all the hooting and hollering on the right about the threat of "one-world government," the true one-world government wears a suit and hangs out at the G-8. It is moving beyond popular control in a hundred different ways, large and small, in places as big as Greece and as small as Denton, Texas. It is all one, anti-democratic continuum, and it is goddamned dangerous.